Content area
Full text
Sarah Cole. Modernism, Male Friendship, and the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. vii + 297 pp.
Sarah Cole's trenchant reading of modernism's investment in male friendship productively reorients discussions begun by Paul Fussell (The Great War and Modern Memory) and Joanna Bourke (Dismembering the Male: Men's Bodies, Britain, and the Great War). While earlier discussions such as these have argued for the centrality of male bonds to the literary and historical imagination of wartime Britain, Modernism, Male Friendship, and the First World War reveals that the "organization of male intimacy" played a constitutive role in the formation of modernism itself. Cutting across an impressive range of fictional material and cultural contexts, Cole shows how writers as diverse as Forster, Sassoon, and Lawrence responded to the reconfiguration of male friendships-and the institutions that had fostered them-in the years of modernism's emergence. Throughout her study, Cole emphasizes the ubiquity of the bereft individual who reels from the loss of friendship and its cultural support systems. Indeed, in one of the most compelling features of her argument, Cole returns us to modernism's familiar associations with notions of fragmentation, loss, and alienation, seeing them as the "excavated" remains of...